Redmond, Washington — After shelving the development of one data center for several months and losing a couple of high profile executives in its data center group, Microsoft plans to open two new data centers in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland in July, both of which will meet environmental sustainability standards, preparing for increased demand for cloud-based services such as Azure and Bing.
However, if the Redmond company really wishes to win the battle for cloud computing dominance as the concept catches on, Microsoft apparently expects an increase in demand once Azure, its cloud-based services platform, rolls out to users later in 2009.
Microsoft on Wednesday plans to open a new 303,000 square foot datacenter in Dublin, Ireland — which the company touts as the “first mega-data center Microsoft has built outside the United States,” Arne Josefsberg, Microsoft’s General Manager of Infrastructure Services, also reported on a corporate blog that 5.4 megawatts of critical power will be on tap from the start, with a total of 22.2 megawatts of critical power available.
The company also planst to open its mammoth, Chicago data center that is nearly twice as large at 700,000 square feet, roughly the size of 16 football fields.
The Dublin facility has been developed with energy efficiency in mind. In place of chillers or cooling towers, rooftop air handling units will drag outside air into the server rooms and then pull the return air from the racks through the rooftop, reducing the facility’s carbon footprint and resulting in an annual PUE average of 1.25.
Combinedly these Generation 3 facilities demonstrate Microsoft’s continuing commitment to improving data center efficiency with a focus on environmental sustainability.
Dublin Data Center:
The Chicago facility, planned to open July 20, will be more than twice as large, covering 700,000 square feet.
“Two-thirds of the Chicago data center is optimized for housing containerized servers,” Josefsberg, wrote in a June 29 post on the MS Datacenters blog. In some data centers, Microsoft has started utilizing standard shipping containers loaded with 1,800 to 2,500 servers, because it can save on electricity by cooling just the containers rather than the whole facility.
“Containers conserve energy and will help us realize new advancements in power efficiency with a PUE [power usage effectiveness] yearly average calculated at 1.22. These prepackaged units (with up to 1,800 to 2,500 servers each) can be wheeled into the facility and made operational within hours, so they represent important advances in the ability to quickly and efficiently provision capacity,” Josefsberg wrote.
The two most recent datacenters that Microsoft opened were a 477,000 square foot facility in San Antonio, Texas in September of last year, and a 500,000 square foot datacenter in Quincy, Wash. which opened in April 2007.
Looking to the future and cloud services both of the new datacenters are developed to support Microsoft’s “growing Online, Live, and Cloud services,” according to the post.
“It is truly exciting to bring these two data centers online … as the company’s Software-plus-Services strategy progresses, these data centers will play a key supporting role,” Josefsberg added.
The Chicago data center is due to open on July 20th.:
The additional data center capability comes as Microsoft gears up Bing, its new search engine, and Azure, its cloud-based platform solution. Originally rolled out in October 2008 at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Azure will ultimately go tete-a-tete with Amazon.com and Google in offering SAAS (software as a service) to its users via distributed data centers.
In the meantime, Bing continues to move strongly against search rivals Google and Yahoo, placing additional demand on Microsoft’s data centers. From June 8 to 12, Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the United States increased to 12.1 percent, a rise of 3 percentage points from the week before Bing’s June 1 release.
Bing demonstrates a reversal of fortunes for Microsoft in the search engine space; according to research company Nielsen, Microsoft’s share of the search engine market had been falling before the release of Bing.